My Master of Walnut Desaster
25 December 2007
Simon and I are spending our Christmas holidays with my parents-in-law in Switzerland and invited all our local friends over for a pre-Christmas brunch on December 23rd. For that occasion I decided to bake Simon’s favourite poppy seed and apple cake (the original recipe taken out of Kochen und Küche – Rezepte über ein ganzes Jahr, volume 5; modified to my personal taste), which, apart from poppy seeds and apples, contains mainly eggs and walnuts. In the absence of flour it is extremely juicy and never gets dry.
I had a whole day for the brunch preparations, and having no other plans for that day I was really looking forward to a nice and relaxing cooking session. Well, it was not quite as quiet as I had expected. The poppy seed and apple cake is generally a very simple and unproblematic recipe, but I had not considered that the culinary offer in Switzerland is – let’s say – somewhat different, so I had a hard time getting hold of some of the (not really that exotic) ingredients. While I had arranged for the ground poppy seeds in advance, I was really stunned to find neither grated walnuts nor the right kind of rum commonly used for desserts in the rest of the German speaking world (Stroh Rum or similar) in a well-assorted supermarket. I could replace the rum by Grand Marnier, but the walnuts were really key. I considered various options, including replacing them by almonds or hazelnuts (where I refused to compromise), or buying them across the nearest border (which, despite Switzerland’s lacking size, would have taken too long).
Trying to keep my mood up (and maybe fearing for his favourite cake), Simon took over as the master as disaster and found a way to grate the walnuts on his own, which took a lengthy (and messy…) trial and error process. Lacking the little hand rasp we use at home for these purposes he tried to grind the nuts in the coffee mill. The result was an extremely sticky mash, which could well have been used as concrete. In a new attempt he tried to first slightly roast the nuts in the oven to dry them before grinding, but they still turned out sticky. In the end he processed the roasted walnuts in a blender with a grater-like inlay, which produced somewhat too coarsely grated nuts, so he roasted and grated them a second time, and finally carefully filtered out the bigger pieces with a coarse sieve. Unfortunately our stocks of walnuts had nearly depleted through all the failed attempts, forcing Simon to make another trip to the supermarket. So bit by bit he lovingly supplied me with my walnuts, which were not only grated but also roasted, and hence left a particularly nice taste. Suddenly my cooking became peaceful. And Christmas could begin…
Poppy Seed and Apple Cake
| 4 mid-sized sour apples |
| 200g ground poppy seeds |
| 140g grated and roasted walnuts |
| 180g icing sugar |
| 2 packages vanilla sugar |
| 6 eggs |
| 1 lemon (juice and grated zest) |
| 1 teaspoon of cinnamon |
| a dash of Grand Marnier or Stroh Rum
(2 bottle cups full) |
| a pinch of salt |
Pre-heat the oven at 170°C. Prepare a mixture of the icing sugar, the vanilla sugar and the grated zest of a lemon.
Peel the apples, take out the stones and cut them into small pieces of about 1cm. Squeeze the lemon and sprinkle the juice on top of the apples. Add the Grand Marnier and the cinnamon and stir well.
Separate the egg yolks from the white and whip the yolks together with the sugar until smooth and foamy (the best result can be achieved if you hold the batter over a pot of steaming water). Whip the egg white until stiff, then cautiously fold into the yolks. Bit by bit fold in the poppy seeds, the walnuts and the apples as well as a pinch of salt until you get a homogenous mixture.
Make sure to use ground poppy seeds, not whole ones. I usually have this done by the market vendor or at a bakery; this time they had just been processed in the coffee mill at home, which also worked out fine.
Fill the dough into a greased and floured baking tin and bake it for about 50 minutes. Wait until the cake has cooled down before taking it out of the cast. If you want to decorate the cake, cut a shape out of baking parchment, place it on top of the cake and just before serving powder the surface with icing sugar, so the space under the paper is left blank; then cautiously remove the baking parchment.